Companies that distribute documents have limited opportunities to protect the content that they are selling from being reused by unlicensed users. As used herein, the term “documents” may refer to files that include content surrounded by metadata. The challenge that these companies face is that they rarely sell the final form of a document. Instead, these companies typically sell document templates. These document templates, e.g., templates for legal documents, presentations, or brochures, among others, enable the users who buy them to achieve a higher quality of document. However, these document templates are typically further customized by the end user. Thus, because the user is allowed to edit the document, the user can also use features, such as, for example, copy and paste features, to reuse components of the document template in other documents.
For certain types of documents that are used in a business context, e.g., business plans or project reports, licensing enforcement is a challenge. This challenge results from the fact that there is a strong expectation that peers or customers of the purchaser should be allowed to edit the document as well. Thus, the electronic document should be flexible enough to be edited by multiple people, while still preventing mass, unlicensed reuse of the original document template.
Companies who sell document templates typically use legal restrictions to enforce licensing. The document template, once sold, is electronically unrestricted, but the user often signs a license agreement stating that they will not share the document template with others.
In addition, some companies use digital rights management (DRM) to encrypt documents containing the document templates, and to force the user to sign-in before they can edit, or possibly even view, the documents. This solution is particularly cumbersome, since the DRM technology may be time-consuming and costly. Moreover, if the document is to be shared with other users beyond the purchaser, there may be a burdensome sign-up step for each new user who desires access. Furthermore, the application which renders this document may have to employ some kind of screen capture blocking software to ensure that imagery, which the provider would wish to protect from unlicensed usage, was not simply screen-grabbed.